I'm wavering from Libertarianism

YeahDude said:
So how do you lean? Do you normally vote democratic? I fear I'll end up there someday. At this point in my life I don't see myself voting democrat. I KNOW I will never(By never I mean as far as I can see) vote republican. That party has turned into some weird christian fundamentalist dictatorship. There is no party for me right now. I will be voting For Randi until I figure it out.
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Can I recommend a podcast? Check out Common Sense with Dan Carlin. He is moderately right of center on economic issues and fairly liberal on social issues. He is also rabidly anti-partisan as he feels that both parties are completely corrupt and useless.
 
volatile said:
Why do you "fear" voting for a party that better reflects the views you have reached after careful consideration?
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The problem with this is I still feel smallish government is the most logical choice. The democratic party isn't exactly smallish.
 
geni said:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

"On the Method of Theoretical Physics" The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933)
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Thank you.
 
geni said:
Why does their have to be a party? Work out your political position then start worrying about which party comes closest when elections come around. Which is still over a year away.
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Working with the closet is what has given us the 2 party system. This system is, in my opinion, conducive to just trying staying in power. They generally push any 3rd party as not a threat, with the MSM's help.
 
Dragoonster said:
I'm mostly liberal, always have been, but haven't ever been "exclusive". Have voted for all parties, each time it just depends entirely on the candidates. Each party has crap candidates and more reasonable ones, so I just compare the two (or third parties too). Maybe it's also because I can see at least some value in most politicians because my positions are kind of eclectic: Pro-choice, pro-drug legalization, anti-gun control, pro-defense, anti-war, anti-Israel (as far as giving them money), pro-death penalty, pro-welfare, anti-affirmative action, pro-gay rights, anti-illegal immigration...

Since no party or single candidate agrees with me on all of these I don't see why I should be a party-liner for any of them. Plus of course most politicians are sell-outs or morons. I vote by issue by candidate I guess, trying to prioritize what's most important at the time.

Have never voted for Randi, though I did vote for Larry Flynt!
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For me that would come down to voting libertarian or democratic at this point in my thought process. Kind of an odd mixture I know, this is why I am confused. The republicans just scare the crap out of me. I picture the scene from Escape from LA where the military guy tells snake that the United States is No smoking, no drugs, no alcohol, no women - unless you’re married - no foul language, no red meat!
 
psychictv said:
You've made some progress. Now the next step is for you to realize that just because somebody can't afford health care doesn't mean they're a "loser."
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Valid point. But I was using the loser parents as my specific example.
 
†= Crap!;5215862 said:
The main reason I just can't get behind right-wing libertarianism is that I have no faith in the "free-market"(a pretty major sticking point). I see no reason to believe the "free-market" necessarily produces the best, or even acceptable, solutions to many human problems. And given that I value large technologically advanced modern societies, I think we need rather large complicated government institutions to provide the infrastructures, industry regulations, and social services that the "market" fails to.
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Please pardon a quick off-topic intro and I'll get to the topic. I'm socially very liberal and fiscally moderate. I almost always vote Democratic but only because the Republicans have been taken over by the fundies and greed-heads. If the Republicans had nominated Powell, I'd have crossed over in a heartbeat.

I'm happy to stipulate that a market economy is the best thing we know. But a "free-market" (laissez-faire) economy is a chimera. We haven't had one for a long time in the US, if ever, and for good reason. Before we had the FDA, hamburger was adulterated with sawdust. Before we had the EPA, a river in Ohio was so polluted it literally caught fire.

Are these agencies models of efficiency? Do they never impose silly or burdensome requirements on the little guy? Not by a long shot. But they help to prevent the more egregious side effects of a market economy. I think they address the key flaw in libertarianism, which is the assumption that people and businesses will deal with each other without fraud.

Regards,

ferd
 
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Come to the dark-side. I'm a mut, a small "l" libertarian and small "s" socialist. Scandinavia and other more socialist countries high in HDI convinced me that it's possible to have a good mix of capitalism and socialism. Traffic lights (regulation) convinced me that regulation isn't per se evil or always harmful. The 1991 California quake (I drove through the epicenter the day of the quake) and subsequent quakes in third world nations convinced me that government could enact good policies to protect citizens.

I would not want the fiscal right to disappear. Social programs can be abused and it's possible to enact to much regulation. I like the adversarial system but I would like to see us move a bit more to the left.

I'll be honest, when I lost my job and my children got sick I found emergency room medicine to be an outrageous solution. Further my kids were not getting preventive care. I then found out that California had a program for folks like me. It was a god send. It wasn't great but I was damn glad for it.

If folks in Scandinavia can lead productive lives with less fear of being homeless or without health care and hard working citizens can still be rewarded for their productivity and ingenuity then what's the problem? Rich people can't become as rich as Bill Gates? Is that the problem?

How many yachts can you water-ski behind? --Bud Fox; Wall Street

Yes the left can exploit class but that is not likley our biggest worry.

One last thing, I'm not a Democrat, Libertarian or even Republican. I don't think of myself as independant but I guess that's what I am. I think political parties are woo and it's for very good reason.
 
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The biggest problem I have with Libertarianism is that it fails to take into account the basic fact that humans are pretty terrible at the whole self regulation thing.
 
YeahDude said:
Working with the closet is what has given us the 2 party system. This system is, in my opinion, conducive to just trying staying in power. They generally push any 3rd party as not a threat, with the MSM's help.
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No. The vast majority of people go with the closest political party in any political system. However proportional representation systems tend to produce a larger number of parties with seats. The very solid two party system in the US is more likely due to it's first past the post election system combined with the dirrectly elected president.
 
Travis said:
The biggest problem I have with Libertarianism is that it fails to take into account the basic fact that humans are pretty terrible at the whole self regulation thing.
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The biggest problem I have with Libertarianism is that it takes an awful lot of models at face value, which they aren´t meant to.
 
I'm a quasi-libertarian. I don't really see how a sewage system would work with small government. Or welfare for those with disabilities. Or private roads. Or healthcare.

But there's a lot of libertarianism I agree with.
 
YeahDude said:
The problem with this is I still feel smallish government is the most logical choice. The democratic party isn't exactly smallish.
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Why should the "size of government" be axiomatic? That is, why should the size of government be a primary concern? Surely the government should be just as big (or small) as the electorate agree it needs to be in order to provide the services the population wish it to?

I never understood why you'd start with a size of government and then figure out what should do, rather than the other way around. I understand even less why you'd find a political party who seems to, more or less, reflect the views you've come to after careful reflection but reject them because the way they wish to implement those views is too "big", whatever that means.

Can you elaborate on a few things?

- Why do you "fear" voting Democratic, the choice of words you used?
- Why is "small government" "the most logical choice", compared to, for example "the size of government required to get the job done"?
- What, even does "small government" even mean?
 
Cain said:
Brink Lindsay, a self-described liberaltarian has made a similar transition. He's still a professional libertarian (works for the Cato Institute) but he says he's "thrown in the towel" on health care -- meaning, people are entitled to basic services. How this services are delivered is another matter (naturally he favors a market approach), but he agrees with the essential point that something must be done, even if it means using tax revenue (oh noes, redistributionism!).
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I was just looking through his blog and found this:

Last year, in a piece called “Liberaltarians,” I wrote that conservatism’s crackup had created the possibility that libertarian-leaning “economically conservative, socially liberal” types might shift their loyalties to the Democratic Party. I was urging liberals to meet them halfway, and that certainly hasn’t happened yet. But maybe it doesn’t matter.

After all, if small-government voters come to think of themselves as Democrats because of social and foreign policy issues, sooner or later they’ll try to make their influence felt on economic matters as well. Will they be able to make a discernible impact on the Democratic Party’s longstanding love affair with Big Government? Who knows, but the very idea is giving Harold Meyerson heartburn — and, surely, that’s an encouraging sign.
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I will try to read more about him and see about this possible shift.
 
I recall listening to a prominent Libertarian on Diane Rehm a while ago, going on in great detail about how terrible government was and how wonderfully everything would run if only the private sector was involved. Cheaper, faster, more efficient...

This was (in retrospect) when Enron was busily bankrupting the state of California, numbers of huge wall-street-related scandals were just coming to light, and the stage was being set for the housing market collapse.
Perhaps my view of such things is jaded by my many years in police work.... History has shown us that oversight is necessary.
 
volatile said:
Why should the "size of government" be axiomatic? That is, why should the size of government be a primary concern? Surely the government should be just as big (or small) as the electorate agree it needs to be in order to provide the services the population wish it to?
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Because libertarians don't trust the electorate. Specifically, they believe that just because the electorate agrees to provide a service does not constitute a reason for the government to actually provide it.

Or, in other words, there are certain things that the government should NOT do no matter how many people want it. Nothing wrong with that idea; that's what the Bill of Rights, for example, details. The Bill of Rights says that even if the entire electorate of Texas says that we should establish Southern Baptism as the state religion, they still can't do it.

But, as usual, the libertarians take a reasonable position to an unreasonable extreme.

I never understood why you'd start with a size of government and then figure out what should do, rather than the other way around.
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What they're actually doing is starting with what the government shouldn't do, with a default answer being "anything."
 
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